1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related generally to electronic/software backup and more particularly to simultaneous and seamless examination of such historical records of backup activity performed across a plurality of backup engines.
2. Description of Prior Art
Most backup engines in use today provide for the repeated, regular electronic transfer, over a network, of data from the point at which it is in regular use to a medium, such a magnetic tape, for the purposes of securing a fall-back situation should damage occur to the original data. Included in the list of such software programs, are programs that work on relatively small amounts of data, sometimes on a one-computer-to-one-tape-drive basis, and others that work on very large amounts of data, with banks of tape drives that are used to back up data from potentially thousands of computers connected to a network. Mostly, these backup engines use what is known as a “client/server” model. In the context of backup, this means that there is one computer (the “server”) that controls and manages the actual backup activity, and other computers (the “clients”) that get backed up by the “server”. In this scenario, the backup tape drives are usually connected directly to the backup “server”. There is also usually more than one backup server, each of which is responsible for the backup of data of numerous clients.
A central function of the activity of backup is the ability to “restore” data in the case of damage to the data that is in use. The backup server computer too usually controls this restore process. Understandably, the time it takes to recover data, and the confidence that the data recovery process will succeed, are two critical aspects of the backup and restore function as a whole. Disk drive capacities and data volumes, and consequently the volumes of data to be backed up, have historically been increasing at a greater rate than the backup server speed, tape drive capacity and network bandwidth are increasing to handle it. Accordingly, new technologies have been added to help. Such new technologies include fiber-optic cables (for fast data transfer across the network), faster chips, tape drives that handle more tapes, faster tape drives, “Storage Area Networks” and so on.
The activity of backup has become more and more critical, as the importance of the data has increased. At the advent of the desktop “revolution”, that is, when people first started using personal computers (PCs), almost every piece of important data was still stored on one, single computer, possibly a mainframe or a minicomputer. As the numbers and types of computers proliferated, particularly on the desktop, and the purpose for which these desktops were now being used, making the data on such computers increasingly valuable, many different products designed to backup data were created and put into the marketplace. Now, there are some 50 or more different backup products in use by organizations and private individuals. Generally, but not always, such backup engines (products) have a reputation for being difficult to use. When there is an exception to this, the backup engine often has other, perhaps related, limitations (e.g. the amount of data is can back up is small).
Not all backup engines perform the same function. Thus, it is frequently necessary to have two or more different types of backup engines in use within the same organization, especially in large organizations. Anecdotally, one company has as many as 17 different backup engines in use somewhere in their organization. This is referred to as fragmentation. In large organizations, is has become necessary to hire expensive expertise to manage such large backup and restore services. The more varied their backup engines, the more expensive this becomes. Also, for large organizations, it has become increasingly likely that scheduled backup activities will fail. Because of the extra complexity of running a variety of backup engines, and because of the shear number of backup activities that need to take place regularly, failed backups often go unnoticed in a sea of extraneous backup information. An additional problem is that beyond a certain number of hours, perhaps minutes, if identifying a failed backup takes too long, then it often becomes too late for meaningful corrective action to be taken. As a result, large organizations often take an expensive “best guess” approach. Anecdotally, the level of confidence that large organizations live with regarding backup success is said to be about 80%. In other words, it is expected that no more that 4 out of 5 backups will be successful. Almost every large organization will relate experiences where data was lost because they mistakenly believed the data was been backed up.
Also, a problem that is of increasing significance is the fact that there is currently no practicable means of charging 3rd parties for backup services rendered, even though the sharp increase in organizations providing that service for pay is expected to continue.
In the marketplace today there are several backup reporting products available. Each works with only one backup engine. There are no known patents relating to any of the following backup reporting products.
                1. Legato GEMS Reporter™, which provides trend analysis and text-based failures analysis. This product works with Legato NetWorker. It is built to handle up to approximately 4 or 5 average-sized backup servers.        2. Veritas Advanced Reporter™ 3.2 from Veritas is similar to GEMS Reporter.        3. SAMS Vantage™ provides statistical reports from backup activity of Computer Associates ArcServelT product.        No known prior art combines backup statistics from a plurality of backup engines with monetary values to produce billing reports.        No known prior art provides billing reports based on backup activity statistics.        No known prior art uses an association with owners of data to control the grouping of data within such a billing report.        No known prior art allows the association of backup data amount pro rated pricing to control the amounts appearing on such billing reports.        